Brother of Rabin’s killer: We would do it again, only earlier

(JTA) — Hagai Amir, a co-conspirator in the 1995 murder of Yitzhak Rabin, has said that in hindsight he would have helped assassinate the Israeli prime minister at an earlier date.

Amir, the brother of Rabin assassin Yigal Amir, wrote on his Facebook page that he and his brother would have killed Rabin “two years earlier” if they could do it over and that he was “most definitely proud” of his actions.

Hagai Amir was released from prison in May. His brother is still imprisoned for gunning down Rabin on Nov. 4, 1995 in Tel Aviv. The Amirs opposed Rabin’s territorial concessions, a condition of the Oslo Accords, which Rabin signed with then-Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat.

A Facebook user named Itzik Karsik asked Amir whether he would support assassinating Zehava Galon, a lawmaker for the left-wing party Meretz, which favors a Palestinian state.

“Of course not — this is not about hating any one person,” Hagai Amir replied. “We don’t fight people’s views, even if they are extreme, but only actions that endanger the existence of the Jewish people in the land.”

Hagai Amir removed the discussion from his Facebook page on Sept. 27 and put a message on Galon’s page saying that he apologized if the discussion “offended her.”